The Emerald Storm

by William Dietrich

  “And if it stays in place, it will take us down like an anchor on a balloon.”

  We divided into two crews. Those in one group began hacking at the foundation of the mortar from the bottom, wielding their tools overhead as best they could. Others crawled to chop and saw at the gun base from the exposed deck above, tying themselves to a line that we stretched from mainmast to bowsprit to keep the men aboard as waves washed the deck.

  “Hurry, hurry!” I shouted to them as they climbed up the ladder to the outside. “We’re nearing a reef! But time the final release to a wave when we can safely roll the monster.”

  “Monsieur Gage, what about us?”

  It was Martel, sitting in the hold in chains where the former slaves had locked him. He seemed more alert now and pointed to his fellows.

  “Just stay out of our way.”

  He grimaced from the pain of his wounds. “It will go faster with more help, and four of my men are still fit enough to labor. Chain me like a dog if you must, but for heaven’s sake use stout backs to save your wife and son.”

  I hesitated. I trusted Leon Martel about as much as an arthritic earl should trust the flexible filly of a wife he bought with ill-gotten inheritance, but time was of the essence. Every second we saved getting iron off our bow gave us a better chance to steer away from that lee shore. I had a pistol and a knife, and he and his scoundrels did not.

  “Don’t leave us here to drown, American!” one of his men added.

  Well, some of the bastards were dead, others wounded, and the starch had been beaten out of everyone.

  So I unlocked the four healthiest ones, including Crow. They wept with gratitude. “You have chosen as a saint would,” Crow assured.

  “Then work to save your life and ours. Rocks are near.”

  The hammering and rasping had become more frantic. I turned to join the others on deck.

  But I’d promised Martel a fatal meeting with Dessalines, hadn’t I? The last thing that bastard wanted was a successful conclusion to our voyage. And the only way his henchmen would get freedom and the treasure was by dooming the rest of us, they figured. All this I realized later. They’d plotted with the desperation of the condemned.

  So I was clubbed from behind.

  I fell and skidded, dazed, the shackle key ring leaving my fingers. Someone snatched it up, and I heard the rattle of more chains unlocking. I rolled and tried shooting, but my pistol was soaked and snapped uselessly. A wounded ruffian staggered at me, and an ax fell toward my head. I jerked to one side just in time. The weapon thunked into the deck, sticking, which gave me time to heave up and shove a knife into the bastard’s ribs. He was Buzzard, I think. He gasped, stiffened, and fell.

  Everything was in awkward slow motion from the sickening heave of the deck. The other gang members were ignoring me, crawling forward to frantically knock open strongboxes and stuff their pockets with treasure.

  Where was Martel? I yanked out the ax from the floorboards, the bloody knife in my other hand.

  The Frenchman was crawling the opposite way, making for the stern. A length of chain was still hooked to one ankle and dragging like a lizard tail. Was he trying to hide?

  No, he’d seized a hatchet. With horror, I realized what he meant to do.

  “Leon, stop!”

  He turned, eyes haunted, lips a crooked sneer. “Mercy is always stupid.”

  “If you don’t work the ship, we’ll die!”

  “And if I do, I’ll still die, but slowly and in a great deal of pain for the long, cruel pleasures of the Haitian rebels. Good-bye, Ethan Gage. I’ll take my chances with the sea.”

  He wriggled into the compartment where the wheel’s cables led down to pulleys and the straining rudder.

  “No!” I cried. “There’s a shoal . . .” I scrabbled desperately after him.

  Perhaps his plan, if he had one, was to throw the vessel into such chaos that his own men could retake the ship.

  More likely, he simply wanted to take us down with him.

  “I won’t let you kill my family!”

  “You killed them by defying me,” he called. “You killed them by letting your wife shoot me. Me, Martel, your only hope.”

  I threw the knife, but he was too far away and wedged tightly amid the wheel ropes. The blade bounced harmlessly off a timber. I charged with the ax, but couldn’t reach him in time. He swung his hatchet, grunting against the pain, and chopped one of the rudder cables. “For Bonaparte!”

  The rope was already tight as a harpsichord wire, strained against the relentless push of the ocean. Now it snapped like a whip, lashing him as it did so. He was flung like a toy, ribs audibly cracking, and smacked against the slack cables of the suddenly useless rudder, evil satisfied. Martel glanced up toward the deck where my wife and son waited.

  Instantly we lost steerage. The ship spun and everyone tumbled, screaming as they realized we were lost.

  If our orientation to the waves couldn’t be controlled, a loose mortar could be catastrophic.

  “I’ll see you in hell, Gage!”

  I grabbed the ladder to ascend to the quarterdeck to shout warning. The storm was catastrophic as we yawed. I dimly saw Jubal and his fellows in front of me, clinging for purchase, each wave that cascaded down the deck’s length washing wood chips with it. The mortar was rocking violently, its foundation loose. But instead of tipping it carefully, we’d created a one-ton peril. Now the ship was turning broadside, entirely out of control. Captain Brienne clung to the wheel, looking at me with horror.

  “What have you done?”

  “It was Martel.” And then, calling ahead, “Jubal! Don’t loosen the mortar! Get back!”

  My friend heard his name. He pulled himself by line toward the mast, one ear cupped.

  The entire ketch began to tilt. We were broaching, sideways to the seas. A monster comber rose, a cathedral of water, and because we were at the far edge of the storm now, a watery sun thrust beams of light on the chaotic sea. For just a moment, the crest of the wave glowed green as an emerald.

  Then it broke, an explosion of foam, and rushed down like a mountain avalanche. Jubal grabbed the mast just in time. I braced myself in the hatchway.

  The breaker hit.

  We rolled completely sideways, masts parallel to the sea, and light vanished. We were underwater, or rather smothered in a mattress of foam, tons and tons of seawater slamming as if to drive our vessel to the bottom.

  Even submerged I heard a snap as the mortar, its pins half chopped through, broke loose. It tore out of the deck and smashed overboard, plunging for the bottom like a stone. A ragged mouth in the deck marked where it had been.

  Water surged through the sudden gap and poured into the hull. The gun had also broken the stays holding up the foremast so it went over, lines jerking like dancing snakes.

  The ship’s rigging was broken, and all hope of controlling the vessel was gone.

  Several of Jubal’s companions and French sailors vanished into the sea with the gun, pulled underwater by the rope they had tied to.

  Miraculously, Pelee’s ballast worked its leverage and we rolled upright again, staggering. Then another crack, like a tree falling in a forest, and the mainmast went over. A broadside wave, and the mast and my black friend were washed away like driftwood.

  I looked back at the wheel. It had disappeared, too. So had Brienne.

  With water pouring in, the loss of the mortar had the opposite effect we’d intended. The ship settled at the bow even more sluggishly than before, and pitched in the seas as aimlessly as a piece of driftwood. The angle of the deck was steepening as the vessel began to sink.

  I crawled toward the captain’s cabin, fighting through surf.

  All was lost, and there was only one thing left to accomplish now.

  I had to save Astiza and Harry.

  Chapter 44

  It was an uphill climb to the cabin of the Pelee. We were at the complete mercy of the sea, being driven toward a reef, every man left now t
o God and glory. The strongboxes were broken, the glorious artifacts of Tenochtitlán clutched desperately like talismans by drowning men, or rattling loose like seashells in the surf. My own mind fogged with fury. That Napoleon Bonaparte himself had set this disaster in motion, as Martel claimed—that he’d used my family and me as puppets—was beyond ordinary political calculation. I’d spent nearly a year plummeting toward this disaster, in pursuit of ancient trinkets that were no more likely to produce real flying machines than scribbles at an asylum. My son had been kidnapped and his mind likely scarred. All to further lunatic aims of invading Britain?

  Madness!

  What I could do now was what I’d been trying from the beginning, to save my family.

  The cabin’s latch had broken and its door flapped and banged. I hoisted past it to the chaotic cave the cabin had become, awash in water and broken furniture. The tier of stern windows was half smashed in, shards of glass sliding in seawater. It was dim to see. “Astiza!”

  “Holding Harry! What happened? Everything upended!”

  I saw her by Brienne’s bunk, her face cut. “You’re hurt.”

  “Afraid. Are we going down?”

  “Martel cut the rudder cable. We’re nothing more than a driftwood wreck.”

  “I love you, Ethan.” She called it, yards out of reach. “You did what you thought best.”

  I clung to that thought like I did to a bulkhead, but had more urgent things that needed saying, or so I thought. The confirmation of my love for her could come later.

  So do we miscalculate.

  The dim light was growing even darker, and I could see a mountain of water rising astern, a wave higher and higher, green and glassy, streaked with foam, the largest wave, in fact, that I’d ever seen. It filled the view from the windows. Then it filled the sky.

  “The masts are gone. We need to get out. Maybe we can find a hatch cover or grate to float off. There’s a reef nearby, which likely means land—”

  The cabin exploded.

  The rogue wave blew in the last of the windows to shove out the air and kick me against the boards. The cabin filled with the sea, foam boiling against its ceiling beams. Then the ocean sucked out as I tried to grip, hauling at my weary fingers. I gasped for air, neck-deep in swirling water. Where were my wife and son?

  “Astiza!”

  The storm answered me.

  Pelee was upending, the decks becoming walls, and I climbed its floor like a ladder, leaping for the windows in the wreckage of the stern. Mullions hung like ragged ribbons. Beyond was the wilderness of water that had sucked out my wife and son.

  I didn’t hesitate. I crawled through, stood on the stern, and watched the useless rudder come out of the sea to flap like a broken whale fluke. Then I dove as far as I could. I managed to thrash to the backside of a comber trying to bury the ship, which meant that instead of being pulled under by the vessel’s sinking, I successfully struggled a few yards away, kicking against the suck of the disappearing ketch. Even with my head above water it was hard to breathe; the boundary between sea and air was indistinct. I looked wildly about. Where was my family?

  Something bumped me, and I frantically grasped. It was the ship’s wheel, a modest float but wood enough to help keep me from drowning. I clung like a kit raccoon to its mother—my ship, my treasure, my friends, and my family all gone. The weight, power, and chill of the churning seawater seemed unbelievable.

  I thought Pelee was gone, too, but no; at the edge of visibility she rose again like an emerging iceberg, picked up by a wave curling toward that wicked line of white that marked a reef or a beach. Was Martel still aboard? Her broken stern climbed toward the sky, the rest still under, and the entire mass of the vessel was hurled forward in the wave as if shot from a sling. Then the comber broke with a roar, and there was a larger crash as thousands of tons of wood hit something solid, splinters of oak and coral tossed up in the air like an exploding grenade.

  The vessel had disintegrated after colliding with a reef. Fragments were whipped away by the wind.

  “Ethan!”

  I whirled in the water. Astiza! She rose in view to the top of the swell, clutching what must be Harry, and then sank out of sight in the trough on the other side.

  Kicking while holding the broken wheel, I began swimming to where I guessed she must be, faster than I thought possible.

  For a long minute I thought I’d lost her again in the chaos, and then rain parted and I saw her hair like a tendril of seaweed, playing on the water as she struggled to float.

  I thrashed toward her. She’d disappear under the waves, then rise again in tired struggle. I kept fearing she’d sink for good before I could get to the pair of them.

  But no, I made it! I grabbed her hair and hauled her to me. As she hacked and coughed I roughly took Harry. I feared the boy dead, but he blinked at my squeeze and spat out seawater. He was in shock.

  Incongruously, on Astiza’s neck was the golden pendant Napoleon had granted us, that N surrounded by a laurel leaf. Maybe that was the curse! I yanked it off her and let it drop in the sea.

  Around my own neck was still the magnifying glass for the emerald I had swallowed.

  The three of us clung to the wheel fragment, but now our weight was almost doubled. The wood sank, and we sank with it, the sea closing over our heads.

  Astiza released her grip and we floated up again, Harry and I carried by the wheel and my wife thrashing.

  “We need more wood!” I cried. “There! Salvation!” One of the ship’s masts rolled in the tempest like a log.

  She gasped and paddled to me again, exhausted. As she grabbed we sank again, so I decided to let go. But when I tried she insistently pushed Harry and the wheel against me and let go herself.

  We surfaced.

  “Ethan, you’re stronger. Hold on.”

  “You take it, too!”

  “It won’t float the three of us.” She coughed. “My strength is almost gone. Hold Harry, and we’ll both swim for the mast.”

  “Then you take the wheel!”

  She shook her head. “Harry needs it. I can’t carry him anymore, Ethan. I’m fading.” She was drifting out of my reach. “Keep the wood and our son.”

  “Come here! I’ll help you swim!”

  “Don’t you dare let him sink.” Her eyes were glazed, but her tone still urgent. “You mustn’t let him go, Ethan. He’s your responsibility now.” She made swimming motions, but they were feeble. She almost lolled in the waves, trying to take a breath. In my exhaustion, she was a thousand miles away.

  “This way!” I don’t think she heard me because I sobbed the words and didn’t have the strength myself to chase both her and the mast. Harry was wheezing, half full of water, and the wheel seemed pitifully inadequate. I glanced back. The breakers on the reef were close, furious, crashing down to throw off huge clouds of spume. Would any of us survive crossing those shallows? We needed the mast! A wave closed over Harry and me, pushing us down, and so I kicked until finally the wheel fragment helped bring us up.

  The mast rolled closer.

  Where was Astiza?

  There, on a swell.

  I saw the wave lift her up as if she’d floated free of our miseries, her beautiful black hair framed against green water like a sea fan. As her head slipped below the surface the wave kept lifting her up, up, up, so that I saw her entire body for a moment, suspended as if captured in glass, backlit by a watery sun, a silhouette that left me aching with longing, regret, and shame. Her legs, her dress, suspended in green amber.

  There was something else in the wave, too, a dark blob just below the surface. It was our diving bell, I realized, like a waterlogged cork. When the mainmast went over, it must have floated free.

  Then Astiza slid onto the swell’s backside and was gone.

  “Astiza!” It was a croak, not a cry. Harry and I went under again, about to follow his mother. I had energy for one last rise, breaking clear, the wheel beginning to loosen.

  The woo
d, our last hope, slipped away.

  So we sank a final time. We, too, were doomed.

  And then something gripped and hauled, as strong as the arm of Poseidon.

  We erupted out of the water and were thrown onto the mast. I retched, trying to get air. “Hold, white man!” It was Jubal. He’d been clinging to the timber and snagged us. I tucked my arm inside a rope, and as Harry threatened to slip free, the Negro grabbed him and pulled my boy to his own chest, his other arm locked on the mast as if welded. No, he was tied; he’d lashed himself to the wood.

  “Astiza?” It was merely confusion. I was about done.

  “Hold!” And then it was our turn to be lifted skyward, higher and higher, impossibly high, rising on the crest of a breaker as if the mainmast of Pelee had become a flying machine itself. We were hurled forward, impossibly fast toward whatever was beyond that line of white, and then fell as it broke. We plummeted down like going over a waterfall.

  Thunder as the wave hit and broke on the coral, the whole mast underwater. We bumped and skidded on the reef. I clung from instinct, not sensibility, while we rolled.

  Then somehow we were beyond, tumbled upright into the air for another agonized breath, and skimmed toward a beach where sand was almost black. The log grounded, started to suck back out, and then another wave struck and we lurched even farther in. Water hammered, sand filled every orifice, and I had no sense of where I was or what I was doing.

  “Let go!” Jubal was waist-deep, yanking to free me from the rope. I came clear, body battered. Harry hung from Jubal’s arm as if dead. The sight of my son was the only thing that kept me going, so I stood, staggering in the swirling surf, and then we awkwardly plunged toward land. The mast pursued, as if to knock us flat after saving us.

  I fell and it struck, but it just knocked me farther ashore. I crawled in foam while the wooden spar rolled away from me.

  A final wave carried me far enough to get clear of the sea. I wiggled upward like a turtle.

  I was on terra firma.

  I looked back at the fury we’d survived. The reef was a leaping boil of crashing waves, and the water between it and shore a soup of foam. Beyond was a tormented sea, some swells picked out by the sun and glowing green and blue, and others shaded by dark cloud and gray as iron. My body ached as if beaten by a club. I was half blind from salt, reddened from cuts and scratches, and emptied of will.